


Sweetness Dim

by lowbrw



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Gideon the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26144281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowbrw/pseuds/lowbrw
Summary: Palamedes, a decidedly matte person, is quite shiny when he smiles. His lambent gray eyes sparkle. His even white teeth gleam. His battered spectacles tilt on his face, unable to withstand the sudden movement of his nose, and their silver frames catch the light in an SOS flare. Camilla has a poor track record of being able to resist smiling back.--An AU in which Dulcinea the Seventh, not Cyntherea the First, lands at Canaan House, and everything goes from there.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Dulcinea Septimus, Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus, Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius, Dulcinea Septimus & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 24
Kudos: 62





	Sweetness Dim

The air in the shuttle is thick with static. Camilla feels it crackle in the back of her throat every time she inhales. Inhaling is harder than it normally is, with her heart stuttering in her chest. But this level of nervousness is nothing she can’t tamp down. She is doing remarkably better than the Warden. The Warden is by nature a fidgety creature, having been averse to stillness since he was a rangy and underfed infant, but he is vibrating at even 1.5 times his normal speed. He alternates between pacing the length of their shuttle and sinking down into his seat, hands tented in front of his face. In between, he polishes his spectacles. At this point, they’ve reached an unreal sheen. If she lets this go on, if she lets the silence coagulate further, he’ll start vibrating at double his normal speed.

“Warden, what was that sentence in the Emperor’s summons? Third paragraph, first sentence.”

“Hmm?” Palamedes is never too nervous to forget a single thing he has ever read. And he is never too nervous to pass a chance to recite something he has read. “Oh, it was ‘ _His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, begs this house to honour its love for the Creator, as set in the contract of tenderness made on the day of the Resurrection, and humbly asks for the first fruits of your household_.’”

“I thought that was strange.” She waits for Palamedes to take the bait, but he’s too busy drumming his heels on the floor. He gives her a distracted nod and drops back into his seat.

“Pal, I thought it was strange because if anything, we’d be vegetables.”

Palamedes stills and turns his wide gray gaze on her, a reluctant smile creeping across his face. “Cam,” he begins, smile getting wider, “What?” Palamedes, a decidedly matte person, is quite shiny when he smiles. His lambent gray eyes sparkle. His even white teeth gleam. His battered spectacles tilt on his face, unable to withstand the sudden movement of his nose, and their silver frames catch the light in an SOS flare. Camilla has a poor track record of being able to resist smiling back.

“Not my finest work,” Camilla admits.

“No, definitely not, but this might be a joke so bad that it circles back to greatness,” Palamedes says. Camilla’s favorite part of his smile are the creases that form at the corner of his eyes.

A beam of golden light breaks over Palamedes’s shoulder, back-lighting him, and they both rush the the nearest window. The First House has drawn into sight. Palamedes runs like he’s a child again, stopping just short of pressing his beaky nose up against the plex. With only a twinge of conscious effort from her brain, Camilla’s feet come to a halt a half step behind him. Camilla’s half steps are perfect, meaning that they are exactly 0.4 meters, or some gnarly irrational number in Imperial Mez. But she has only spent half of her life tailing him, and they are not in public, so she comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

“It’s so blue,” Camilla says, because it has to be said.

“And green,” Palamedes replies.

“And...white.”

“And, curiously, gray.”

“I wonder what the story is behind all that gray,” Camilla says softly. Pal hums his agreement, and she can almost hear his mind begin to whir. She knows that the multitude of gray shapes on the surface of the First are likely the remains of lost cities, but she wouldn’t be able to call herself Sixth if she were satisfied with such a shallow, unintimate version of the truth. The First really is so blue. Camilla struggles to comprehend just how much damn water is on this thing. It seems excessive. They use water comfortably on the Sixth, dealing with mild usage restrictions maybe once or twice a year. Of course they do. Some Sixth scholars would slice their own mothers open from sternum to spleen if it meant they could improve water supply chain efficiency by 0.3%. But this amount of water must have impeded upon the First’s inhabitants, surely. This amount of water must have swept away buildings and rotted homes and encroached on city limits. How could it not? How could this swirling expanse of aching blue do anything less?

In the light of the star Dominicus, the First looks like it’s on fire. Light is nothing new to her. But she definitely hasn’t seen this quality of light before. The Sixth, as bosom with Dominicus as it is, doesn’t court the light so openly. The light must first pierce through the Sixth’s thick fug of atmosphere if it has any hope of kissing the planet’s surface. Along the way, it turns soupy and thin, leached of all its color. But the steady, golden light on the First intensifies the longer she’s in it, like a tension headache.

She slants a glance at Palamedes. He’s limned in golden light, the overwrought blue marble of the First reflected in miniature in his spectacles. Not for the first time, she’s glad she’s with him. He turns towards her, grinning. Camilla, almost reflexively, grins back.

“We’re going to have the time of our lives.”

“Conjecture, Warden,” she says. They both know that means she agrees.

\--

It turns out that they have landed after the Seventh. She knows that the Seventh is all Palamedes is interested in right now. If she’s honest with herself, it’s all she can think about, too. They are only two shuttles away. There is only the fat round shuttle of the Fifth, and the sleeker, shinier shuttle of the Fourth between them and the Duchess of Rhodes, the Lady Dulcinea Septimus, the heir to the Rose Unblown. Or, as she insisted they call her in their letters, Dulcie.

Palamedes reels a little, and Camilla looks over and sees that Lady Septimus and her cavalier have already exited their shuttle. Protesilaus, the cavalier, is holding an umbrella over his adept while stretching out his legs. She can tell just by looking at him that he multitasks often and with great dexterity. The Lady Septimus sits in a wheeled chair, mired in sea-foam green ruffles. They both look as sleek and Seventh as promised. It had been Camilla, a newly minted teenager at the time, who had found Dulcinea’s photo. They thought it would take longer to track her down, but they had underestimated the power of the pituitary gland. The only difference is that in the photo, Lady Septimus’s curls had been girlishly long. Now they’re cut close to her head, springing away from her scalp. But everything else is the same: the sugar brown of her hair, the warm blue of her eyes.

She isn’t sure how they’re going to play this, and from the way the Warden’s shoulders are bunched up by his ears, she knows he isn’t sure either. Camilla catches his eye. It is some errant twitch, some haphazard firing of her nervous system, that does it for them. She jerks an elbow in the vague direction of the Seventh, and that’s enough. Pal takes a deep breath, takes her hand in his, and lurches forward.

Palamedes halts a few paces away from the Seventh House adept and cavalier, who look towards them with naked interest. Camilla gently tugs her hand out of Palamedes’s, and settles into her perfect half step behind him. Camilla’s heart billows as she recognizes the tube of stiffened mucous epithelial tissue that runs from the Lady Septimus’s nostrils to the collar of her dress. They had done that together, the both of them. They had walked on air for months afterwards when the Lady Septimus confirmed that it worked.

Up close, Camilla can see that she was wrong. The Lady Septimus is not at all like her photo. She had been 14 in that photo, and it had only been of her face. Her lively blue eyes and insouciant, dimpled smile had filled the entire frame. It is only the liveliness of those eyes that have remained the same, leading Camilla to her errant conclusion. Everything else is different. Her cheeks are hollower. The dark arcs curving underneath her eyes are tinged with violet. And when the Lady Septimus is taken in as a whole person, instead of just her bright and animated face, her overall air is one of waste. She is even frailer than Camilla’s worst imaginings. Camilla is not sure why exactly her heart is caught in her throat. She is not sure whether this happiness is tinged around its edges by dread, or if it is the dread colonized by the happiness.

“Duchess Septimus of Rhodes,” Palamedes says, his voice starched and formal. He is digging his fingernails into his palm, a nervous tic he hasn’t really relied on since he was 14. But he can be forgiven. This is, after all, the love of his young, bright life in front of them, in the pallid flesh. And there is, after all, a rejected marriage proposal and an ebbing flow of letters hanging between them.

Perhaps a smile threatens the corners of her lips, but the Duchess Septimus of Rhodes straightens in her chair, and smooths down the green pleats sprouting around her knees. She inclines her head towards Pal, the very picture of formality.

“The Master Warden, Palamedes Sextus,” she says. She turns to look Camilla straight in the eye. Camilla, despite herself, feels her knees turn to jelly underneath her warm blue gaze.

“The Warden’s Hand, Camilla Hect.” Her voice, at least, is exactly what Camilla had imagined, dulcet and silvery.

Then she bursts out laughing. Camilla joins her a beat later, if only because she wanted that first moment to really, really listen to the bright bell of Dulcinea’s laugh. Palamedes is also laughing from his belly. God, the look on his face. Camilla could spend the rest of her life in that look on his face.

“Pal! Cam! Oh, come here, you little ducklings,” Dulcie says. And, just a little dazed, they find themselves bending down to hug her. Pal, because he is Pal, drops down to one knee so Dulcie doesn’t have to reach so far up. “Goodness, you two are tall. What are they feeding you over there on the Sixth? Nevermind that, forget I asked, I don’t want to know the horrid details.” She’s giggling. Camilla is grateful that Dulcie is so generous with her laughter. She soaks up the sound of it like thin, hungry soil. They also receive firm handshakes from Protesilaus, who looks out at them from the sensitive eyes of a poet.

Dulcie folds Camilla into her thin arms. She smells like roses. She’s so fucking Seventh. But underneath the roses is something bitter and chemical. Camilla squeezes her eyes shut. She’s not surprised when moisture beads in her lashes, but she hadn’t been expecting it, either. Dulcie’s hand grazes over one of the many knives Camilla keeps strapped to her person, and she says, “Oop--oh, so you really are happy to see me, aren’t you, Cam,” and a laugh tears out of Camilla like a bat out of hell.

“Look at you two,” Dulcie keeps saying, her voice approaching a croon. “Look at you two. How did two scrawny little prepubescent terrors grow up and become the Emperor’s Reason? Oh, look at you two.”

“There is so much to say between the three of us, isn’t there,” Dulcie says, “But I suspect here is not the place to do so. So tell me! How was your flight?”

“What about your flight, Dulcie,” Palamedes says, bursting like an overripe grape. “The rapid changes in air pressure--your lungs--”

“Pal,” Dulcie interrupts. “I am fine. Absolutely fine. Of course, I smoked three packs of cigarettes and gave our pilot tobacco poisoning, but other than that, I’m just peachy.”

Pal halts, his mouth slightly ajar. “I’ve always hated that joke of yours,” he says.

“Dear boy, and that’s why it still works after all these years,” Dulcie says.

“Our flight was smooth, but the Warden here was ready to jump out of his own skin,” Camilla says. Dulcie laughs. Camilla feels so warm. There is light of Dominicus beaming down unfiltered on her, and there is the Rose Unblown before her. She has the very gentle feeling that there is no other place in the entire Universe she’d rather be.

\--

“It’s been a while since I’ve been in a meeting both so boring and so wildly mysterious,” Camilla says as they’re following a skeleton to their quarters. Camilla fingers the heavy new key ring in her pocket. They both know, and don’t have to say, that the plan is to drop off their things and immediately get to work. They’re also both eyeing the easy, smooth-jointed gait of the skeleton in front of them, but there are more pressing mysteries for now. Just for now, though.

Palamedes throws his head back in an earnest bark of a laugh. “Yeah,” he agrees. “God, the Second are such walking stereotypes of themselves, aren’t they?”

“And strangely the Ninth is not. I wonder where on the Ninth that Cav found sunglasses, of all things.”

“Perhaps it’s not so strange,” Palamedes says. “I’d love to pick the Ninth’s brains over their routine maintenance.”

Camilla rolls her eyes. “God, Pal, let that go. It’s been like 7 years.” When they had been 13, Pal had suggested that the Sixth had something to learn about routine maintenance from the Ninth. He had never been laughed out of a room like that before, and has never been since.

“Don’t tell me to let perfectly good ideas go,” Palamedes says, with delicate peevishness.

“Well would you look who it is,” comes a familiar, silvery voice. “I guess the Sixth and Seventh living quarters must be close to each other.” They turn and see Dulcie and Pro, trailing a skeleton of their very own. Dulcie has summoned the strength to walk, pushing her empty chair in front of her, while Pro carries both of their bags with no apparent effort.

She walks towards them. Even at her full height, she’s short. She barely comes up to the Warden’s chest. Under the golden light of Dominicus, her face had looked babyish and soft. In the wrecked gray light of Canaan House, she looks her age. And she looks tired. So, so tired.

“Pal, Cam, I wanted to say this early, and with complete honesty. I’m very interested in working together with you in the upcoming trials. I think there is much you can offer me, and at the risk of sounding conceited, I think there is much I can offer you. There is also the fact that you have given me a mountain of evidence that I can trust you with my life. I hope I have given you some grounds that you can trust me with yours.”

Palamedes has taken off his glasses. They don’t need more polishing, but Palamedes needs some way to busy his hands. “Lady Septimus, I think nothing could make me happier.” He looks at Camilla. “And you, Cam?”

“I think, Lady Septimus, that there are sufficient grounds.” Cam’s voice comes out cool and clear, which hadn’t been guaranteed.

Dulcie looks between them. Simply put, she melts. “My darling pals,” she says. It comes out sounding like a sigh. “How fortifying it is to have fellow zealots for the truth by my side.” She gives them that wide, melting smile for just a moment more, and then turns back towards Pro.

“We begin in twenty minutes,” Camilla calls out.

Dulcie doesn’t bother to look back. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, my dears.”

\--

Only Dulcie could rope them into the kitchen. Camilla was strongly in support of the idea of taking a break from necromantic theorems and eating food. She was somewhat less in support of the idea of cooking for themselves. But the skeletons in the kitchen don’t mind their intrusion at all. They just move aside their pale meats and baskets of limp greens, their joints suspiciously well oiled, and continue their work unbothered.

Dulcie is insistent that they cook a meal for themselves. Something something ugh enough of the gray, nutrient dense blocks they feed you on the Sixth. Oh I am completely sure that your dinners are packed with protein and full of fiber and have every vitamin imaginable under Dominicus, and you Palamedes only look so skinny because you’re the most necromantic necromancer to ever necromance, but I am the Joy of the Emperor, Camilla, I am the King Undying’s very joy, so under my watch you will have some sugar. And alcohol. Goodness are you old enough to drink? Will it stunt your growth? Well, not that you need to worry about your growth, you two are absolute string beans. Anyway, we are making cheesy onion soup. Camilla, don’t you know onions can be quite sweet? Oh dear, we do have our work cut out for us.

And that is how Camilla, Palamedes, and Pro have all come to stand shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, with Dulcinea sitting besides them, dictating what they should do. Pro, the show off, has already cut through his share of onions and has moved on to shredding all the cheese. Camilla is nearly done with her own onions. She would have been done already if she wasn’t discreetly cutting some of Palamedes’s share for him. Pal, good sport that he is, has tears running down the entire length of his face. Even if he weren’t blinded by his own tears, he’s too much of a perfectionist to be of much use in the kitchen. No matter how many times that Dulcie reminds him that he doesn’t have to cut his onions all exactly the same size, he remains tentative every time he brings his knife down. While Palamedes mops at his eyes with his sleeve, Camilla seizes the opportunity to correct his grip on his knife.

“Uh--thanks, Cam,” Palamedes says thickly, sniffing. Dulcie, laughing, proffers him her hanky. They’ve all been chattering easily. Camilla had been a bit worried about potential awkwardness, but it seems like a decade of letters has warded away any awkwardness.

“What were you in the middle of saying?” Dulcie prompts.

“Ah,” Pal says in response, distracted by a new onslaught of tears.

“He was telling you about the Ninth adept,” Camilla fills in. “You say that the Warden is the most necromantic necromancer to ever necromance, but the Ninth adept could give him a run for his money. How much of a necromancer stereotype do you have to be to forget to eat and drink, and then pass out in a bone cocoon? But yeah, as he was saying, her cav’s vow of silence is bogus. There’s less Ninth in her than you’d think.” Camilla smiles. “She said ‘ass.’ I quite like her.”

“The one with the sunglasses, right?” Dulcie asks. “I have to say, I didn’t think there was much Ninth in her to begin with. The skull on her face is, if I’m being nice, simple and clumsy. Amateur’s work, really.”

Camilla decides to take pity on Palamedes and shoulders him out of the way. With the heels of his palms pressed over his streaming eyes, he sits down next to Dulcinea. “Since when have you been so knowledgeable about the penitents of the Locked Tomb?” he asks around a sniffle.

“Oh, I thought they were really interesting when I was younger,” she says. “I used to tell my brother that I would banish him to the Ninth if he didn’t let me play with his toys. I kept it up for weeks, so naturally I had to research my threat.”

“You’re evil,” Camilla says fondly.

They chatter on for a bit more. Palamedes recovers slowly. His gray eyes are still watering, but tears no longer drip off his chin. “I promise it’s worth it,” Dulcinea says, patting his head affectionately. They really are absolute string beans in comparison to her. Dulcie has to stretch her arm to its full length to reach the Warden’s head. After a while, they lapse into comfortable silence.

“I think it’s time to talk about why I turned down your marriage proposal, Pal,” Dulcinea says.

Pro--who had finished grating his cheese, and in a real show off move, started making bread--averts his eyes. He focuses on his bread with intensified interest. Camilla has no inclination to do the same.

“Yes,” the Warden says gently. “It probably is.”

“When you have spent much of your life dying, as I have, there are obviously many days when you wish it would just happen already. You get sick of your stupid, slow dance with Death, and wish that the River would just grow some balls and claim you already. But after we became friends, I would think about you two often on those days. My mind would turn towards the two scrawny, prepubescent terrors tearing through the Sixth. And I’d know that if I could not live for myself, at the very least, I could live for you. I am saying, plainly, that I love you more than you can imagine, and owe you more than you know.”

“But marriage is a very different thing from love, Pal. A very final, official thing. I would not be fit to call myself your friend if I let you yoke yourself to a dying girl. And you would not have even come to love me in the first place if I were the type of person to allow that to happen. You are so young, Palamedes Sextus, you have always been so much younger. If it is in your fate to become a widower before you are 25, it will not be at my hands.”

“Yes. Well.” Palamedes takes off his glasses, and places them on the table. “Yeah. I do think I put you in an uncomfortable situation there, didn’t I? I am sorry for that, Dulcie. But you know I’d do anything to help you.”

“And there are simply some things I cannot accept from you.”

Palamedes smiles. He bends down and tries to kiss the back of her hand. Half blind from tears, he misses wildly, and kisses her on the inside of her elbow. This Dulcie accepts with a smile.

“And you, Cam?”

Cam looks over at Dulcie. “And what of me?”

“Oh, Cam. I am so sorry.”

“What?”

Palamedes begins to glow. She turns around, and Pro and his bread have both disappeared. The skeletons in the kitchen have all disappeared. Dulcinea is glowing too.

From Pal, this time: “Cam, I’m so sorry.”

\--

And then Camilla is blinking awake. The weight of reality does not come crashing into her all at once. Instead her dream retreats, an ocean wave falling back, and hard bits of reality glimmer at her in its wake, seashells sticking out of wet sand. She has only been in an ocean once or twice. There is no ocean on the Sixth; Dominicus pulls water away from the planet’s surface like a jealous lover. But on the First she had gotten her chance. She had convinced Palamedes that he needed a break and fresh air, and the ocean was inescapable in Canaan House. He had splashed at her. She had held his head underwater. When she let him back up, he spat out salt water, a laugh bubbling out of him.

The rest of it comes back too, of course.

She remembers scraping the flesh off of the pulverized remnants of Palamedes’ skull. What an array of insults she had lobbied at that skull over the years. She had called it impossibly thick, dense, impenetrable, the root of all of his stubbornness. How wrong she was. Here it was between her two hands, fractured beyond recognition.

She had to scratch away the dried brain matter from the most delicate sections with her nails. Her fingers had been gummy with bone glue for months. At first she had tried not to imagine Palamedes folding in on himself. But then she decided, fuck it, there is no way around prodding this particular bruise. She began to outline in her mind, with crisp Sixth rigor, exactly how Pal turned himself into a god killing star. Once she had found just three hairs clinging to the outside of his parietal bone. That time, and only that time, she let herself go lay down. Palamedes has never loved in moderation. The force of his love is a fearful thing, but the practice of it has always been diligent, careful. She learned this from him. The best parts of her have always come from him.

She becomes aware of hands on her shoulders. Sitting down on her bed, uninvited, backlit by a halo of weak morning light, is Coronabeth.

“Are you okay?” Coronabeth asks.

Camilla considers asking ‘Why?’, but that is not a question she can really ask while tears unbidden leak out of her eyes. “Yes.”

Coronabeth leans back a little, but she does not remove her hands from Camilla’s shoulders. With a tinge of reluctance, and another, stronger tinge of wariness, Camilla realizes that she is glad for those hands.

“You were laughing,” Coronabeth says softly.

Camilla sits up, ignoring how close this brings her face to Coronabeth’s. She had learned young to press down a smile while she watched Sixth squabbling, to choke a laugh into silence in the vaulted walls of the Library. Of course now, on a cold and unfamiliar ship, her closest ally _Coronabeth_ of all people, her subconscious mind forgets. She feels Coronabeth’s hands tighten on her shoulders.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

She suddenly wants to shrug off Coronabeth’s touch. Does the finger miss the hand? Does the spider miss the web? An inane question. It is not so much that she misses him, it is that the idea of missing him wrenches the limits of her imagination. Pal had been the hook upon which she hung the long gray coat of her life, and vice versa. Her necromancer, her warden, her favorite second cousin. Her best friend. She knows that this quick flash of anger, this tooth aching rush of noradrenaline, is not meant for Coronabeth, so she waits for it to subside. Subside it does, meekly, fleeing like a wounded animal, and on the other side Camilla hears her voice flatly say, “Yes.”

“Isn’t the worst part how much you wish you were more useful? Well, maybe not, the worst part is obviously just missing them.” Coronabeth’s laugh is hearty and golden. She laughs like she’s used to people laughing with her. “But don’t you feel like all you’ve ever wanted is to stand behind them, and now that’s impossible, and we’re just left here? And everything we knew for 20 years is just over. It all hurts, really, but you just don’t expect that part of it to hurt so much.”

Camilla leans forward to study Coronabeth’s eyes. They’re huge: generous in both the pupil and iris, with the same velvety luster as the skin of a plum. Camilla thinks she can read them, and right now they’re all warm earnesty. Coronabeth must have taken this movement as a good sign, because a truly ethereal smile warms up her face, and she gives Camilla’s shoulders a squeeze.

“But I think you’re a really special person, Camilla Hect. I think you’re one in a million. I think no matter what, you’ll end up alright.”

Camilla considers her options. One possibility is for her to smash Coronabeth’s head into the floor. She should be careful not to underestimate Coronabeth’s lithe, wiry strength, but not in this fantasy. She’d sit on Coronabeth’s chest and snarl: “It’s over for you, but not for me. You didn’t think ahead, you didn't make contingency plans, but we did. We didn’t all go to Canaan House hoping to stumble blindly into lyctorhood. We did the simple work of looking both ways before we crossed the fucking street.”

The second option is the one she goes with. “Thank you for sharing your perspective, Coronabeth,” Camilla says mildly.

Coronabeth’s smile widens, and Camilla immediately takes back her fantasy of smashing her head. This girl is trying. She doesn’t have to try. They can go as strangers on this cold, unfamiliar ship, or they can have a clumsy, misshapen bond. Coronabeth leans her cheek on Camilla’s shoulder. Camilla finds herself staring at a wreath of healthy, bouncy curls. The give of Coronabeth’s cheek on Camilla’s humeral head is almost luxurious. How could anyone believe that this girl, her cheekbones encased in glossy fat, was a necromancer? Canaan House suddenly feels light years away. Which it is.

What is Camilla so guarded for? What can happen to her now that hasn’t happened already? There’s no harm in this, in having flesh and warm blood and a heart still faithfully beating underneath her hands. She presses her palm into the golden curls, cupping the curve of Coronabeth’s head. Coronabeth stays there a moment, then she shifts, and Camilla’s hand falls away. Camilla stares into those eyes. If she’s reading them correctly, the warmth in them is approaching heat. She feels Coronabeth’s palms, slightly sticky with errant moisture, come to rest on her face. Then she tips her head forward, and they’re kissing.

Camilla isn’t sure how long they kiss for, just that she’s the first to draw back. “I think that’s enough, Coronabeth,” Camilla says evenly.

Coronabeth’s eyebrows briefly knit together, but they smooth back out again just as quickly. “Okay,” Coronabeth says. She summons up a quick smile. Then, without a hint of awkwardness, Coronabeth backs off of Camilla’s bed. She’s the type of person to give Camilla a little wave before padding out of the room.

Camilla lays back down. She allows herself to run a thumb over her lower lip.

She wants badly to talk to a friend. She wants to gape and squeal, she wants to whisper, eyes wide, “what was that?” In her mind’s eye she allows herself to imagine Pal. Her second indulgence. She can picture his face. He would be shocked, more shocked than her, the prude, but he would quickly recover to deliver some dry comment. He would never pass up so ripe, so golden an opportunity to deliver some dry comment. She stops herself there. She is not so desperate for indulgence that she needs to imagine exactly what he would say. Would he even have something funny to say? Coronabeth is far too robust to be his type anyway.

The absurdity of her own desire does not escape her. She wants to talk to Pal about Coronabeth’s warm and unwieldy attempt to comfort her, when what she was being comforted over was his death. The hole Palamedes leaves in her life cannibalizes itself like a Mobius strip.

She sighs. Her third indulgence. The hypothetical is getting too easy for her these days. It’s a little early in the day, but it’s not worth it to try and go back to sleep. She’ll use the time to be thorough in her stretches and exercises. She sits back up, puts her feet on the ground, and scrapes on.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to [runobody2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2)  
> [Failed Alias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FailedALIAS/pseuds/FailedALIAS)  
> [outlaw_baby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby) for brainstorming with me and giving me invaluable feedback!! 
> 
> And I'm sorry. But blame Tamsyn Muir, not me.


End file.
